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[¶1.] During the late seventeenth century, the collection emerges as a distinct genre with the specific role of exploiting the diversity of Restoration society, and selling classical culture to English readers. With the revival of the court in 1660, an elite culture developed that esteemed both the skills of extemporaneous translation and literary wit and the traditional forms of late-Renaissance English verse. Likewise, Charles's court welcomed both poet-courtiers and professional writers. While the verse produced by this community revels in topical allusions, it also employs tropes accessible to a varied audience. As writers, publishers, and readers realized, this breadth of reference allowed the audience imaginatively to enter the court and theater merely by buying their literary works. Published virtually as soon as it was written or produced, this dramatic and court literature promotes the fresh and topical as the touchstone of fashion. Reading thus became an avenue to identification with the elite.
[¶2.] In their production and consumption, Restoration miscellanies accommodate a courtly elite and a widening readership. Even if the scribal process of production, although free from the conformism of printed culture, creates hegemony, as Harold Love has argued, the translation of this culture into print created ideological fissures.1 These the anthology bridged by its form and discourse. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out, "Discursive space is never completely independent of social place and the formation of new kinds of speech can be traced through the emergence of new public sites of discourse and the transformation of old ones. Each `site of assembly' constitutes a nucleus of material and cultural conditions which regulate what may and may not be said, who may speak, how people may communicate and what importance must be given to what is said."2 Similarly, each miscellany comprises a network of meanings that translates the court literature into fare accessible to a general readership.3
[¶3.] Although Charles's courtiers were writing within a manuscript tradition, their verses were printed as part of a commercial enterprise. Printers, booksellers, and even court members frequently engaged in unlicensed printing, a procedure that exposed their works to a new audience just as authors like Rochester avoided the problem of censorship by circulating their compositions in manuscript form. Printers were already mediating between these literary modes by means of periodicals like the Gentleman's Journal, as Margaret J. M. Ezell explains:
While the editor and bookseller . . . represent the professional nature of the publication, its contributors were still operating within the realm of amateur literary coteries--readers were expected to be writers, and writers were expected to participate in the creation and cohesion of an exclusive literary group. Their role was not the passive consumption of a literary product created by paid professionals.4
[¶5.] Periodical forms allowed the interaction of readers in print.5 Literary collections offered the same opportunity to publicize "closet" pieces for readers not joined to the inner circle.6 By printing the fashionable subjects and style of the moment, moreover, these court anthologies extended them beyond that moment. Once such works were reproduced in the relatively permanent form of the printed collection, both the contemporaneity and the exclusivity of the original text and audience were muted.
[¶6.] This fresh context also invited a method of reading that accommodated the contradictions of contemporary society. The new court, with its classical anacreontics and conspicuous consumption, advocated literary topics and values and interpretative procedures at odds with those of the previous twenty years.7 This change was reinforced by the new constraints on publishing that replaced religious with political restrictions.8 Charles II, however, advocated a tolerance that overlooked such differences as did not threaten the throne. As both Steven N. Zwicker and Michael McKeon have argued, much Restoration verse rejected excessive polemics to postulate a separation of politics and aesthetics.9 Subversive traditions, moreover, which had continued even during the Commonwealth, had established in the Restoration a new cooperation between religious and secular texts.10 After the proliferation of pamphlets and ephemeral publications during the Interregnum, topical and fugitive literature had become a permanent aspect of literary culture and, in John Feather's words, "had helped to create a wider market for printed matter [and] had reinforced the Puritan ideology of the necessity of literacy."11 Even after the Puritan ethos had sunk from visible popularity, changes in the book trade made the print of seventeenth-century England "the means above all others of generalized public discussion."12 Such changes, as D. F. McKenzie explains, promoted the emergence of booksellers and printers with special interests and personal commitments to literary quality, and, correlatively, a new concern with the "correctness," uniformity, and accuracy of printed productions.13 These circumstances facilitate a reading that accepts ideological differences by identifying elite style not with scribal culture or social behavior but with fine print.
[¶7.] The court anthology particularly exploits the tensions and sympathies between the audiences of court writer and general reader. Restoration verse encourages readers to admire stylistic virtuosity; at the same time, contemporary writers voiced subversive ideas both through the circulation of manuscripts that circumvented printing restrictions, and by the technique of irony. Readers, familiar with Puritan censorship if not with classical tropes, could be expected to search for hidden meanings in published court literature: the very prominence of stylistic devices invites a reading that goes beyond or beneath them. Jacques Derrida explains this play between surface and implied meaning as a fluid deferral of meaning that perpetually undermines one category by evoking the other. In the context of the Restoration court, this evocation of printed différance accommodates contradictory ways of reading that spring from differences in readers' cultural educations.14
[¶8.] The central vehicle for the convergence of manuscript and print traditions is the court anthology. Mary Thomas Crane points out that sixteenth-century anthologies countered the aristocratic literary convention that produced individualistic lyrics in manuscript for private readers with a collective, public or published, aphoristic convention, adding that although these intermixed, by the civil war they split again into a self-expressive manuscript tradition and a separate printed tradition, only to converge once more in the Restoration.15 Court anthologies indeed embrace many contemporary literary practices. While elite, these books represent collective literary culture: manuscript and printed, Royalist and Puritan, private and public, including songs, translations, and lyrics composed extemporaneously, or distributed in manuscript, and influenced by the English tradition as well as Continental style. Their "individualistic" lyrics of personal experience, moreover, employ a language laced with social and political overtones, so that collective and private experiences become aspects of one another. Foreshadowing the novel, these compendia permit what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia," the articulation of opposing cultural traditions and voices within one context. Indeed, they sometimes inscribe it by promoting variety or différance where none exists. They are the printed expression of a culture seeking to unify divergent traditions.
[¶9.] In bridging opposing traditions, court anthologies test the limits of both. As printed vessels of manuscript culture, they disrupt private references by exposing them to public reading and disrupt public meanings by alluding to privileged contexts. These effects are similar to those that Mikhail Bakhtin has traced in the link between competing narrative voices and cultural modes of control. In analyzing the relations between "popular" and "high" culture, Bakhtin has pointed out that certain spaces in the culture--periods of time,places, forms--may be preserved for a reveling carnival that reverses the hierarchy and mocks the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the spiritual with the physical.16 Restoration anthologies imitate carnivalesque liberty. They negotiate conservative impulses within iconoclastic forms, illustrating "the recurrent adjustment that literature makes [between] convention and revolt."17 They also tend to level cultural distinctions by welcoming jokes and riddles as well as classical translations. Their catalogs of contents suppress differences between the two traditions while the rubric of "variety" links them. At the same time, this riot is controlled. As Gerald Hammond has observed in analyzing Herrick's poems, the very appearance of books of verse promises a uniformity that borders on poetic meaning: "Nothing is more civilized than a volume of poems. The typographical layout of line and space makes each poem appear regular in construction, attractive to the eye, and self-controlled in keeping well away from the margins of the page."18 Similarly, the court anthology regularizes its contents within uniform covers.
[¶11.] To accommodate different kinds of reading, Restoration printers refigure political differences as aesthetic plenitude. Even as they issued collections of political verse like The Dregs of Drollery: or Old Poetry in its Ragges (1660), featuring texts newly glossed with the panache of previous prohibition, they urged reading for form, not merely meaning. For example, Henry Brome's Ratts rhimed to Death: or the Rump-Parliament hang'd up in the Shambles (1660) warns, "If thou read these Ballads (and not sing them) the poor Ballads are undone."19 If read according to the wrong genre, they lose their power. This poetry, whether spoken in a prologue or handed around in manuscript, seeks to move the audience with a rhetoric derived from oratory.20 Much of this rhetoric, like popular verse, deliberately burlesques both the previous and the present regime.21
[¶12.] Anthologies unified new readers as participants in this aesthetic pleasure. By exploiting the slippage between oral and printed forms, and political and personal meanings characteristic of Restoration poetry, and by juxtaposing political and love poetry in the vernacular, these collections "politicize" sex and "sexualize" politics with metaphors of "courtship." Political and sexual fulfillments in this literature, moreover, usually remain distant, never achieved, a condition of limitless possibility congenial to the imaginative engagement of the reader.22 Collections facilitate the exchange of language and allusion from one venue to the other. For example, Hobart Kemp's 1672 Collection of Poems. . . . Never before in Print links popular and courtly oral and printed modes.23 Although the ornamental headpieces and two calligraphic typescripts advertise the scribal origin of the verses, the punctuation and spelling, and the differences between these texts and later reprintings, suggest that Kemp edited it with an ear to oral delivery and innuendo.24
[¶13.] The organization of the book induces aesthetic comparisons. It highlights the most reputable poem, clusters thematically similar works together in the rest of the volume, and tails off toward the end with a jumble of pieces. By commencing with the longest, most ambitious piece, the earl of Mulgrave's "Temple of Death," Kemp establishes the critical credentials of the volume, which in fact comprises platonic and theatrical love songs. Part 1 concludes with a "Prologue at the opening of the Duke's New Play-House," while the second part opens with "Falling in Love with a Stranger at a Play," including a poem entitled "The Platonick," to key readers into the literary mode. Among the love poems is Rochester's verse "To Celia. Celia, the Faithful Servant you disown," later titled "The Discovery" (pt. 2, no. 26). As David Farley-Hills notes, however, this verse precedes another by Rochester, "To Celia. Celia, All things submit themselves to your Command," later titled "The Advice"(pt. 2, no. 27), which advances the "antiplatonic viewpoint" of carpe diem verse. Farley-Hills posits that this juxtaposition illustrates "Rochester already engaged in his favorite device of demonstrating the relativity of values."25 In this context, however, in which "Celia" has already been evoked in six poems, the pair contrasts attitude and voice in order to engage differently minded readers in the collection, and to amuse them through stylistic variations. Kemp emphasizes this variety by juxtaposing poems that treat similar themes from different angles, and by reprinting in his index their contrasting first lines or long titles. Thus "To a very young Lady" precedes "The Forsaken Mistress," both verses that address women who lack love but doing so from different temporal and social vantage points (pt. 1, nos. 11, 12). Again, "To a Lady, who fled the sight of him" precedes the contrasting "To a Lady, who askt him, how long he would Love her" (pt. 1, nos. 22, 23). Some juxtapositions hint at a political narrative. The triplet of "To Celia. Princes make Laws, by which," "To Cloris. Cloris, I justly am betray'd," and "To a Lady, who told him, he could not Love" hints at the identification of love with princely tyranny or unjust power that "justly" earns betrayal and reproach.
[¶14.] While these verses employ conventional imagery, Kemp accepts the overlap between political innuendo and subjective emotion that Charles Gildon edits out in his 1692 edition. In Kemp's version of "To Celia," for example, Rochester vows that love, were he not blind, would submit to her, and then declares, "But Fate hath otherwise dispos'd of things / In different Bonds subjecting Slaves, and Kings" (lines 9-10). In Gildon's version twenty years later, line 10 reads "Bands subjected." This editorial alteration softens the original. The tense shift puts the condition of subjection beyond remedy by distancing it in time--fate has already "subjected" mankind--and by substituting the term "Bands," which connotes primarily "A tye" or "bandage," for the harsher term denoting "cords" or "chains."26 Gildon also replaces the archaic but alliterative "hath," which echoes "otherwise" and "things," with "has," a rendition perhaps more suited to the silent reading of print. As a further pacifier, Gildon inserts these lines: "Fetter'd in Forms of Royal State are they, / While we enjoy the Freedom to Obey" (lines 11-12). This couplet solaces the reader by conjoining him or her with the author, enjoying the divine privilege of free will while power languishes in chains.
[¶15.] The differences between the audiences that Kemp and Gildon address may be seen again later in the poem. Gildon once more softens the oral force and the political implications of the verse by printing, "Submit then Celia e're you be reduc'd, / For Rebels vanquisht once, are vilely us'd" (lines 31-32), but omitting the following lines that appear in Kemp's version:
And such are you, when e're you dare obey
Another passion, and your Love betray.
You are Loves Citidels, by you he reigns,
And his proud Empire o'er the World maintains;
He trusts you with his Strategyms and Arms,
His frowns, his smiles, and all his conquering charms.
(Lines 33-39)
[¶17.] These lines possess oral power: the first line contains the internal rhyme of "e're" and "dare" and syncopates them with the slight assonance between "e're" and the first vowels of "obey" and "Another." Such effects are largely lost when the verse is read as a printed poem. The metaphorical connection of love and rulership, furthermore, gives this passage an innuendo that would be repellent to Gildon, who self-consciously deleted indecencies in his collection. If Celia is a "rebel" when she "betrays" her master, he might well be the king. This king, however, reigns by virtue of her sexual power, trusting--or thrusting--her several "Citidels" with his "Strategyms" and "Arms." These capitalized terms suggest a double entendre at once sexual and political: sex rules the king. Whereas Kemp risks this innuendo, Gildon addresses an audience distant from the court but probably familiar at least by hearsay with the pirated 1680 edition of Rochester's works, featuring several poems linking politics and sex. While Rochester's "Satire on Charles II" making the same point had not yet been published, it might have been known by rumor.27 Rochester's name was firmly associated with scandalous language. Kemp welcomes a multivalent meaning that Gildon represses.
[¶18.] Both Kemp and Gildon, however, include poems defining the reader as member of a courtly community that prefers the intellectual pleasures of art to sex. One thematic pair in Kemp's collection instructs readers on how to interpret and praise literary culture, "To Mr. J. N. on his Translations out of French and Italian," followed by "Voitures Urania" (pt. 1, nos. 14, 15), while three of the four final items of part 1 address literature. The exception, "The Imperfect Enjoyment," itself part of a tradition of poems about sexual performance, blames the difficulty of mutual pleasure on what might be construed as a middle-class attitude, modesty.28 The final item, "A Prologue, Spoken at the opening of the Duke's New Play-House," again uses sex and gender to discuss cultural politics.29 In this context, the speaker of this "Prologue" unifies the evoked theatrical audience with the reader of this book by mocking the false values of the "other": audiences who rate a fancy place over wit, and playwrights who rate money over fame. Like the "Prologue," "The Imperfect Enjoyment" criticizes artifice, posture, and "ceremony." Both poems characterize sex as a commodity for exchange between the man and the woman, and both conjure a male audience: in the "Prologue," the man is purchaser of the play time, be this theatrical or sexual, while "The Imperfect Enjoyment" describes sex from the male perspective. Whereas the theatrical audience has power over the play, however, it is the woman whose power conquers the man in "The Imperfect Enjoyment," albeit only after his "force" has overcome her. Using the trope of sex, both poems condemn failed sexual community, yet as parts of a printed collection promote the unity of participants in literary culture.
[¶19.] Court anthologies publicize authorial freedom. Like their predecessors, Restoration poets convey political attitudes through literary conventions, but whereas the poets of the Renaissance and early seventeenth century had largely admired the unity between the "private" experience of love and the "public" role of politics, Restoration poets satirized or fretted at the gap between them.30 The freedom with which poets could treat the subject exemplified their freedom from the moralistic restraints of the Commonwealth; moreover, sexual poetry celebrated the libertinism of the king and his court, becoming a form of panegyric. Sex had also ideological dimensions, for the poetic attention to the body and to sensation served to criticize the spiritual pretensions of Puritan religion, and to condemn what these later writers saw as the manic feuding over esoteric details of religious doctrine. By focusing on sensations experienced by every male body, this sexual poetry also rationalized the political impotence and spiritual desolation of a cynical age.31 In a reversal of cultural values, significant experience was represented as individual sensation rather than social action--worship of the body, not of the spirit. While the resurrected notion of hierarchy based on birth (the king) fed courtly metaphors in love poetry, in which inaccessible women demandobeisance from love-struck men, Restoration verse inverted these relationships.32 Just as the beheading of Charles I compromised the notion of absolute authority in a divinely chosen king, so his son depended on the people to restore him to power over them. Likewise, much of the sexual poetry depicts women dependent on men for the very passion they themselves inspire.
[¶20.] Pornographic and erotic poems consequently appear in most collections. In this context, they publicize private pleasure. Many of these poems are veiled attacks on women within the courtly convention. Pointing out the coincidence of pornography and periods of political anxiety, Elaine Hobby suggests that the prominence of women in Charles's favor, on the stage, and in culture might have produced male resentment.33 Poems of sexual inadequacy (premature ejaculation or impotence) also expose the disjunction of desire and performance, and, by employing political metaphors, rationalize or trivialize political and personal failures. Similarly, the prevalent poems on male and female inconstancy in love work to demonstrate the nature of the fickle English who betray their lovers, kings, spouses, or themselves. By juxtaposing love poetry with social and political verse, collections emphasize the connection between these themes in language, method, and meaning. Indeed, by exploiting stylistic and topical disjunctions, anthologies reproduce this exchange of meanings.
[¶21.] Few writers facilitated this exchange as well as Rochester. As David M. Vieth has shown, printers and booksellers evoked his name to lure readers to buy court anthologies that actually contained few of his works, and far more poems were attributed to him than he wrote, while many of the poems he did write were censored or considered too scandalous to print.34 This paradox may be explained by several features of Rochester's work that made it ideal for the genre of the anthology. First, as a highly visible, aristocratic member of the court, Rochester participated in a communal, creative circle that sneered at publishing and remained aloof from print. Through the anthology, however, Rochester's elite and exclusive culture was transferred into a public medium, accessible to the ambitious and the curious. Second, although a member of the court, he was not politically powerful, and even his political verse largely addresses universal themes.35 Finally, in both hisperson and his poems, Rochester enacts carnival: the reversal of the status quo within a specific sphere.36 Within the "con-text" of a printed miscellany, Rochester's poetry invites readers to participate imaginatively in the debasement of the very values they have purchased. By simultaneously endorsing and rejecting cultural hierarchies, these readers are accorded power over the print culture they consume.37
[¶22.] Eighteenth-century editions of Rochester's work reinforce his almost mythic connotations of freedom. In Tonson's 1705 edition of Poems on Several Occasions, Thomas Reyner celebrates Rochester's liberty both from the habits of revision practiced by professional poets and, by implication, from social restraints, declaring that Rochester, "was loose from all Discipline of that kind. He found no Body of Quality or Severity so much above himself, to challenge a Deference, or to check the ordinary Licenses of Youth, and impose on him the obligation to copy over again, what on any Occasion had not been so excellently design'd."38 In this discourse, Rochester embodies freedom from censorship, as well as license. This freedom, however, in the eighteenth century necessitates that the body of work be edited before being offered to a refined audience, for Reyner remarks, "But, after all, what must be done for the Fair Sex? They confess a delicious Garden, but are told that Venus has her share in the ornamental Part and Imagery . . . [therefore the printer has edited it] so that this Book is a Collection of such Pieces only, as may be receiv'd in a virtuous Court, and not unbecome the Cabinet of the Severest Matron." Through this censorship, Rochester becomes fare for all readers. The edition contains the mock-pastoral description of masturbation, "Fair Chloris in a Pig-Sty lay," with the final verse deleted but the meaning quite plain, as well as bowdlerized versions of "Upon his Drinking a Bowl," "Love a Woman!" the "Maim'd Debauchee," and others. By including these verses while announcing that they have been censored, Tonson represents Rochester as wild yet fine for the newly discriminating readers of the eighteenth century.
[¶23.] This edition, indeed, reinvents Rochester as a skilled craftsman for an audience trained to admire craft. Praising Rochester's Satyr Against Mankind over Boileau's original, Reyner declares that "It may not be amiss to see some lines of Boileau and of my Lord Rochester together, on the same Subject," and prints them to enable the reader to compare styles and recognize the compression and imagination Reyner admires. Reyner interprets Rochester as a model of the value of restraint in direct opposition to the value of explosive freedom for which he was revered during the seventeenth century.39 Hinting that Rochester represents a native classical author, Reyner notes that he achieved more by the time he died than either Horace or Virgil at his age, adding coyly, "Far be it from me to insinuate any thing like a Comparison with the Ancients. Only we may observe, that no Stile or Turn of Thought came in his way, that he was not ready to improve. . . . one might question whether my Lord Rochester imitates Anacreaon, or Anacreaon humours my Lord Rochester" (ii-iii). In this characterization, Rochester represents classical culture.
[¶24.] In contrast, Restoration audiences admired Rochester for liberty. The Earl of Rochester's Poems on Several Occasions (1680), piratically published against the family's wishes a few weeks after Rochester's death in 1680, points to the role of the anthology in transferring literary authority to print. Although David M. Vieth has proved that this edition contains works by several hands, it was advertised and sold as a collection by a single author, purportedly containing the literary productions of one person's sensibility.40 On the other hand, Rochester's sensibility, blazoned through his scandalous exploits and a few songs and lyrics published in his lifetime, became representative of the court culture of the Restoration. Since the verse in this collection, whether by Rochester or others of his coterie, was known to be originally circulated in manuscript within the court, moreover, it embodied the sensibility of an in-group. While Rochester stood for the epitome--or nadir--of the literary culture of Charles II's reign, at a time when the authorship of printed literature was not as important culturally as context, Rochester's name, once transferred into print, stood for a mode as much as for a particular author. Rochester was both only himself and also a surrogate. The 1680 edition thus mediates between the individual authority represented by single authorship in manuscript and the contextual authority of print culture.-
[¶25.] Several of the poems published in the 1680 edition demonstrate the way Rochester's carnivalesque mode characterizes the reader. As many critics have noted, Rochester burlesques literary conventions, a technique that simultaneously informs readers about literary conventions and trivializes theseconventions.41 Using physical and personal themes, his explicit, colloquial language reverses cultural hierarchies: the cerebral or spiritual is converted into coarse physicality.42 "Upon his Drinking a Bowl," for example, parodies the cultural celebration of surface, as Barbara Everett observes, shattering with a final obscenity the conventional formula that precedes it.43 This anacreontic approaches grotesque excess when Nestor's bowl of wisdom is described as holding "Vast Toasts, on the delicious Lake, / Like Ships at Sea" (lines 7-8). If "toast" is a scatological allusion here, as in Mac Flecknoe, Rochester is coalescing consumption and excretion. Certainly in the final stanzas, the consumption of high and low culture meet:
But carve thereon a spreading Vine
Then add Two lovely Boys;
Their Limbs in Amorous folds intwine,
The Type of future joys.
Cupid and Bacchus, my Saints are,
May drink, and Love, still reign,
With Wine, I wash away my cares,
And then to Cunt again.
(Lines 17-24)
[¶27.] In the first stanza, the resting hero directs Vulcan to decorate the ceremonial object with a conventional illustration of cherubs, if in unconventional embrace; in the following stanza, his invocation precedes a call back to active duty.44 In this anacreontic, Rochester contrasts two kinds of physicality: the delicate refinement of the cup and the brutal return to "Cunt." By portraying the ceremony embodied by the cup as a precedent to the common activity of coupling, the poem degrades not only the literary convention of drinking songs but also the social hierarchy whose elite share the same nature as all humans. Both "Wine" and "Love" become commodities, stripped of mystique.
[¶28.] This carnivalesque reversal extends to the relationship between reader and writer. In "An Epistolary Essay," which discusses literacy, a popular theme in anthologized poetry, Rochester's persona identifies writing and reading as acts of free choice that link cerebral and physical release. Presented in manuscript within the court context, this poem bristles with specific allusion, but printed in an anthology it represents instead the general categories of writer and reader. Whether Rochester originally intended to mock the earl of Mulgrave or himself, in the context of the 1680 collection the poem debases literary creation and demystifies the aristocratic writer.45
Were Reading forc'd, I shou'd be apt to think
Men might noe more write scurvily, than stinke:
But 'tis your choyce, whether you'll Read, or noe,
If likewise of your smelling it were soe,
I'd Fart just as I write, for my owne ease. . .
What though the Excrement of my dull Braine,
Runns in a harsh, insipid Straine,
Whilst your rich Head, eases it self of Witt?
Must none but Civet-Catts, have leave to shit?
(Lines 32-36, 40-43)
[¶30.] This debasement works paradoxically in the context of a printed anthology to explode the authority of print. The passage opens by conjuring a coercive world in which behavior, including reading, is constrained, a world perhaps resembling the Commonwealth when religious "Reading" was, if not "forc'd," at least urged. In opposition to this world, the persona celebrates the willful anarchism of both writing and reading, in which writer and reader follow their own desires. This discourse echoes booksellers' prefaces celebrating anthologies as vessels of social cooperation that yet respect individual taste. By being published in an anthology, the poem conjures a cohort of independent readers linked by their purchase of the volume.
[¶31.] The court anthologies that popularized the verses of Rochester and other Restoration wits demonstrate the transferral of court culture into public print. This poetry particularly suited the anthology because it represented elite taste and appeared in brief, conventional forms that were easy to read. As Dustin Griffin has observed, these "court poems" vaunt the social power of wit by their verse and treat apolitical themes.46 Because his verse mocked elite culture even while celebrating it, Rochester's lyrics especially bridged diverse audiences.
[¶32.] Another member of the court community, Aphra Behn, similarly celebrates community and independence, but she does so in the role of editor as well as that of poet. Her theatrical collection transforms oral, dramatic poetry into a printed literature that represents the social cohesion of the court coterie.47 Entitled The Covent-Garden Drolery: or a Collection of all the Choice Songs, Poems, Prologues, and Epilogues, (Sung and Spoken at Courts and Theatres) never in print before. Written by the refined'st Witts of the Age, it contains seventy-five pieces, including twenty-one prologues and epilogues drawn from plays staged between 1667 and 1672, theatrical songs, and other love songs probably written for the collection. Dryden, then poet laureate, wrote fourteen of the pieces.48 Behn contributed a prologue and four love songs, including a "Song" about mutual pleasure that became "The Willing Mistress."49 This volume draws on a tradition of play poetry, which, having become politically sensitive when Cromwell closed the theaters and suppressed such publications, had found muffled expression in verbal instructional literature like A Help to Discourse and Wits Recreations.50 Unlike such vehicles of political opposition, however, Behn's collection publicizes the unity between ruler and writers, and among versifying members of the court. Its stylistic and thematic coherence also conjoins dramatic literature, written for performance, with lyric verse, written for private reading.
[¶33.] At the same time, like Rochester, Aphra Behn articulated opposition to Restoration cultural assumptions. By drawing attention to constructions of gender in her verse, she broadens the heteroglossia of the court anthology to include the voices of sexual as well as social opposition.51 She revels in metaphors of masking and deceit that satirize surface, while her plots center on "cross-wooings, disguise, misunderstandings and masquerades" that challenge identity.52 Throughout her work, she consistently presses for sexual freedom and for the equality of this freedom for women and men, attacking social tradition and coercion. Elin Diamond, moreover, shows that Behn was also highly sensitive to the contemporary commodification not only of texts but also of their authors, especially through the purveyance of ideals of sexuality and the display of the female body.53
[¶34.] As an editor, nonetheless, Behn adapts elite literature to general readers. "The Willing Mistress" first appeared under the title "Song," opening "I led my Silvia to a Grove" in Behn's Drolery; in her third play, The Dutch Lover (1672/3), however, Behn changes the speaker and the title to "Amyntas led me to a Grove."54 This change centralizes the experience of the poem in the speaker, the seduced woman, instead of referring to the more conventional trope of seduction: the specific dramatic context re-creates the poem as a form of idiosyncratic speech rather than an example of a popular genre.55 It is only within the context of the play and the immediate reprint of the song in Choice Airs and Dialogues (1673), however, that this new title occurs.56 When Behn published it in her single-authored collection Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), she replaced the informal, contextual title with a conventional noun phrase "The Willing Mistress," and this is the way it also appears in Charles Gildon's reprint of Behn's collection in 1692. Although the poem remains the same, this new title recontextualizes it within the print convention of poetic portraits of sexual mood. It is distanced from the oral immediacy of a theatrical song and introduced into the context of classical songs, including poems by Horace, Ovid, Catullus, and Martial. It fits with the other songs following it, each also three stanzas long: "Love Arm'd," "The Complaint," "The Invitation." Unlike the earlier version, which invites the reader to sensation, "The Willing Mistress" is packaged as part of literary tradition.
[¶35.] The history of this verse illuminates the differences between Restoration and eighteenth-century literary values. When The Covent-Garden Drolery was reprinted in 1707 as The Muses Mercury, the editors shaped it "to bring [these Verses] within the Rules of Decency," and to conform to the standards of the volume.57 They suppress its immediacy and subversive language with clichés and neoclassical diction. Echoing the bowdlerization of the 1705 edition of Rochester's verse, this revision elucidates the function of editors in adapting Restoration verse to the early-eighteenth-century audience, for while regularizing the meter, they intensify sound devices and parallel phrasing. In place of the conversational line "Which made me ready to receive / That which I dare not name," which displays female desire, the revision "They lov'd so much, they scarce cou'd live / So much they both did burn" formalizes rhetoric and feeling. While distancing the narrative person from "I" to "They," it offers the antithesis of "love" and "live," the alliteration of l, s, and b, and the assonance of "lov'd," "much," and "much"--changes that substitute artful balladic rhythms for the original, more relaxed lines. The final line, by bidding readers or "Lovers" to finish the song, dissolves the historical specificity of the title and the particularity of the first person. The values of oral immediacy, however, were what made it popular during the Restoration. Immediately after Behn's drollery came out, a burst of such volumes appeared in the 1670s, most with loco-specific titles. N.C.'s Bristol Drollery, for example, specifically pays tribute to Behn's earlier publication.58 This tradition of labeling a collection with a specific locale continues into the eighteenth century with such publications as Edmund Curll's 1713 Tunbridge Miscellany. Such particular titles advertise the freshness of the poetry, commemorate particular experiences, and proffer those experiences, through print, to the reader.59
[¶36.] In transferring oral verse to print, Aphra Behn's collections equate theatrical verse with classical literature. Behn's later anthology combines court, theatrical, and occasional verse to embody high literary culture for a middle-class audience. The 1685 Miscellany was organized like Tonson's Miscellany Poems, issued the previous year.60 Opening with a long translation of Musaeus of Hero and Leander, which announces its literary merit, and concluding with an appended volume of translations of La Rochefoucauld's maxims, a sort of commonplace book, it contains short, contemporary odes, pindarics, prologues, epilogues, verse epistles, elegies, epitaphs, epigrams, translations (mainly from Horace, Ovid, and Catullus), and songs by Behn, Rochester, and others. Since items are roughly grouped around particular genres as in booksellers' miscellanies, most of the translations by Horace or Ovid cluster in the same part of the volume, yet sections of translation or polemic are leavened with pastoral lyrics. The silk place-keeper or register may suggest that printers packaged Behn's Miscellany as if it were to be read sequentially like a single poem, rather than opened at random, but it certainly advertises the prestige of the collection. The book encourages the experience of variety by the shifts of length, tone, and topic of its eighty pieces in 382 pages.
[¶37.] This structure was conventional. Indeed, Behn herself discusses with Tonson this very organization in 1684 when, plagued by poverty, she was arranging the issue of Poems upon Several Occasions with the addition of her Voyage to the Island of Love: "Methinks ye Voyage shou'd com last, as being ye largest volume. You know Mr. Couly's David is last, because a large poem, and Mrs. Philips her Plays for ye same reason. I wish I had more time, I wou'd ad something to ye verses yt I have a mind too."61 This format attracts audiences by keeping the longer, more difficult reading to the end. The short "fillers" in the middle included many of Behn's own poemsfrom ten or fifteen years earlier, and one song by Rochester, several by Dorset and Etherege, Anne Wharton's "The Despair," some poems by Henry Crispe, a send-up of the Dutch by Henry Neville Payne, three songs by Mrs. Taylor, one by Otway, six by Tom Brown, and two by R.A.62 Furthermore, Behn incorporates poetry by and for women, and many poems about love. Indeed, love works simultaneously as a political and a private theme, linking male and female, courtly and domestic audiences.
[¶38.] Despite its variety, Behn's Miscellany celebrates a coherent court culture unified by Royalist ideology that blends political and social themes. The longest poem within the volume is Nahum Tate's unattributed political satire, "Old England, or New Advice to a Painter," which, although flanked by translations nearly as long, serves literally to center the volume on political verse. In this long advocacy of moderation, Tate uses the image of a lost utopia in a conventional Restoration mode.63 While confirming the political ideology of the collection, Tate, as a former poet laureate, also helps to establish its quality. Other poems invite allegorical interpretation. T[om] B[rown]'s pastoral, "The Parting," for example, laments the division between Charles and his brother, using the metaphor of love. In addition, several poems discourage the reader from political life, like Horace's ode 6, bk. 3, "Of the Corrupt, and Degenerate Manners of this Age," and "In praise of Folly," by R.A., which, by deriding learning, wisdom, and care as paths to self-dislike, doubt, and cunning, attacks false counselors and impertinent subjects in the manner of Erasmus. This open satire contrasts with three light poems on love and verse, including a panegyric to Aphra Behn that further endorses the collection's quality. The resulting medley allows topical and universal interpretations.-
[¶39.] Certain contents are notably designed to vary the volume's tone. For example, Behn further leavens the mix of love and politics with a poem attractive to traditional readers, her own eight-page "Paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer." This "paraphrase" extrapolates in heroic couplets from each phrase of the prayer; thus, like a commonplace book, it manifests a personal reaction to or interpretation of the authorized text. The Lord's Prayer, furthermore, always followed the "alphabet" called "Christ's Cross row" in eighteenth-century children's hornbooks.64 Its presence here links the readership of this collection to the readers of Puritan and children's literature. By printing each phrase of the prayer in large italics, separated from the handful of rhymed lines glossing it, the printer preserves the visual conventions of pop-ular religious cribs, a form familiar to readers ignorant of Latin. The formal, humorless language and sentiments of this paraphrase also appeal to a different sensibility and audience from the other work in the volume. At the same time, its format of fragmented yet connected thoughts balances the secular maxims of the separate pamphlet of Seneca Unmasqued appended to the end. Substituting for a classical translation, "Seneca Unmasqued, or Moral Reflections. From the French"--only the second rendition in English of La Rochefoucauld's maxims--is prefaced by an analysis of the self-love within every human decision.65 By formally complementing the "Paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer," these snippets tie together the themes of the contents while linking the volume with proverb collections and commonplace books.66
[¶40.] In 1692, Aphra Behn's 1685 Miscellany was reprinted by Charles Gildon as Miscellany Poems Upon Several Occasions: Consisting of Original Poems, By The late Duke of Buckingham, Mr. Cowly, Mr. Milton, Mr. Prior, Mrs. Behn, Mr. Tho. Brown &c. And the Translations from Horace, Persius, Petronius Arbiter, &c. With An Essay on Satyr, By the Famous M. Dacier.67 The differences between this and the original volume illustrate the changes in the literary climate. Whereas Behn conjoins her authors as participants in a unified culture, Gildon lists the most famous names on his title page to advertise the volume to readers seeking literary authority. In his dedication to Mr. Cardell Goodman, he evokes moralistic terminology; he asserts that this is no "VULGAR book" and has fewer "trifling Verses" in it than any other collection. Gildon also guides his reader's interpretation of the contents by borrowing Dacier's Essay from his sixth volume of Horace, "which will let our English World see those hidden Beauties of this great Poet." Dacier urges the reader to look beneath Horace's apparent simplicity to his profundity, italicizing his central message that Horace teaches us "to conquer our Vices, to rule our Passions, to follow Nature, to limit our Desires, to distinguish True from False, Ideas from Things, to forsake Prejudice, to know thoroughly the Principles, and Motives of all our Actions, and to shun that Folly which is in all Men, who are bigotted to the Opinions they have imbibed under their Teachers." This arrangement and preface moralize and elevate Behn's volume as a collection of satires applying to private life.
[¶41.] The anthologies of the early Restoration mix high and traditional, new and translated literature. They contextualize vernacular with classical verse, theatrical and oral literature with scribal and printed works. As a link between manuscript and printed literature, Rochester particularly represented elite culture for new audiences eager to improve themselves through reading. Herself a link between theatrical and printed literature, Aphra Behn notably exploited this market by collecting together contemporary poems crossing borders of sex and education. The literature that Aphra Behn anthologized was produced within a concentrated culture in a small society,yet her collection invited both court and general readers, included political and personal verse, contained women and men poets, and both commended and criticized the regime. The revisions of later anthologizers reveal how carefully her collections were tailored for the contemporary audience, and how a widening readership dictated changes in both the literature and the rationale of the anthology. As mediator between professionals and courtiers, Behn exploited the form of the anthology to include the heteroglossia of a society in flux.
[¶43.] The early Restoration launched the literary anthology as a compendium of dramatic and court verse that allotted space to competing voices. After the first twenty years of the Restoration, however, individual printers and booksellers sought to garner a greater share of the market than their rivals by using anthologies to promote the names of authors whose copyrights they held. By testifying to the contributors' membership in an elite coterie, these collections characterize their readership as culturally elite. As Roger Chartier explains, "It was not that editorial strategies created a progressive broadening of the book-reading public; rather, they created, and to an unsuspected extent, systems for gauging differences. Such systems categorized the products of the printing trade in cultural terms, thus fragmenting the market into clienteles presumed to be discrete and establishing new cultural frontiers."68 In England, many editors, booksellers, printers, and writers deliberately fostered this proliferation of markets in order to multiply their audiences. As anthologies became profitable, booksellers' assembled miscellanies also multiplied. These literary collections fragmented into specialist collections, including volumes of translations, compendia of verse from the previous thirty years, and miscellanies by special interest groups.69 Since these audiences were differently educated, anthologies began to include literary criticism, especially neoclassical theory. While this theory connoted political allegiance to the Tories and promoted the translations of particular authors, often those educated at the Anglican universities, it also supplied ambitious readers with a guide for discriminating among different collections and authorial styles. At the same time, moreover, booksellers, critics, and schoolmasters issued directives for writers and readers that explained how to understand and talk about English literature. During the last years of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, literary anthologies transform into vehicles of cultural competition that define readers by their stylistic preferences.
[¶44.] These new forms reflect the increasingly commercial, competitive practices of the book trade. While these practices propelled publishers like Jacob Tonson to contrive new forms of "miscellany" publication, they also formed links between booksellers and customers in a period of increasingly anonymous book purchasing. Three of these practices particularly facilitated the compilation of anthologies. The first is advertising. By publishing titles and prices quarterly, the Term Catalogues (1668-1709) informed retail booksellers of available material, keeping their stock active, while also publicizing for readers the latest literary productions. Even after the Term Catalogues ended, their function was filled by such periodicals as Edward Cave's Gentleman's Magazine (1732).70 Printers and booksellers also printed voluminous advertisements in books and newspapers. In addition, booksellers began to print catalogs for book auctions, with titles and dates, but not always prices. These forms of publicity both promoted literary novelty, variety, and contemporaneity to customers and warned printers and booksellers of their competition, inviting them to assemble miscellanies in imitation of printed anthologies and to publish rival collections. Second, novelty, variety, and plenitude were also promoted by wholesaling and new methods of distribution. With these advances, booksellers increased their readership, sidestepped censorship restrictions, and opened provincial markets to recent literature. Finally, the compilation of the cooperative form of the anthology also reflects changes in the financing of publishing. The trade refined complex methods of joint copyright-holding that protected printers and booksellers, reduced piracy, and initiated the cooperative contracts which made the trade so powerful in the eighteenth century. While members of these congers shared the risks of publication, however, the congers themselves promoted the rankings of authors, works, and kinds of publication, determined by a combination of price, novelty, social prominence, and content. Levels of readers and reading began to layer the literary market and to encourage the multiplication of literary anthologies that mediated among such layers.
[¶45.] While the literary anthology of the late Restoration embodies these changes, its fundamentally dialectical structure persists, albeit in modified form. Although during this period it increasingly combines similar rather than different works, it negotiates between individual taste and cultural categories by using the idea of aesthetic preference as a class symbol. Whereasthe anthologies of the early Restoration invited readers to join the court circle, these books reinscribe the integrity of individual readers and their free relationship to printed culture. If particular compendia promote specific styles as elite or fashionable, the status of the genre and its prefatory discourse emphasizing the variety of the contents endorse difference. Where Tonson's Miscellanies assert their consistent quality, moreover, lowbrow or assembled compendia leave to the reader the task of rating disparate verses. At the same time, these anthologies increasingly define the reader's role in literary culture as aesthetic evaluation entailing social superiority. By several strategies, late Restoration literary anthologies replace political with aesthetic contexts. One is radial organization, by which poems are clustered together as different treatments of a similar mood or theme, rather than arranged narratively to produce an argument or climax. Other strategies include universalizing editorial prefaces and the juxtaposition of neoclassical and folk-inspired poems. By including the essential elements of translations, new poems by contemporary authors, and theatrical literature, these collections define the audience as high-class consumers of classical fashion.
[¶46.] The question of what constituted stylistic elegance was fraught with social and political issues. Style itself was a term that included genre as well as structure and phrasing. Since only Anglican men could attend the universities where Greek and Latin were taught, whereas Dissenters underwent an education in modern languages, what readers enjoyed was largely a matter of education and wealth, and was therefore inextricably bound up with political influence. By being able to judge classical translations, readers demonstrated their elite education, their social standing, and often their allegiance to the Tory party. In contrast, Puritan readers were trained on parables, prose, and allegory. Literary anthologies link these audiences through a format that, by confining differences to style alone, rather than language, subject, or context, emphasizes the similarities among different genres. In addition, anthologies feature genres that themselves bridge different cultures. Biblical paraphrases blend imitation and religious literature; epigrams and epitaphs are genres both classical and native; and "Scotch songs" cross over between anacreontics and folk ballads, spanning popular, oral traditions and elite literature.
[¶47.] This cultural shift begins to define literature as a sphere of middle-class consumption. By diverting critical evaluation to the stylistics of poetry, printers and booksellers reinforce the middle-of-the-road ideology of a form that, from its inception in a period of cultural turmoil, rejected univocal partisanship. At the same time, as readers from a wider section are exposed to literature, they are rhetorically subordinated to literary authority, divided into ranks, and informed that the enjoyment of literature requires education. As Stallybrass and White have observed, during the early Restoration, Charles II's court invited satirical treatment because it resembled carnivalesque reversal: "The Court was both classical and grotesque, both regal and foolish, high and low." By the century's end, however, aided by the manipulations of the book trade, printed poetry elevated both author and audience.71 This elevation coincides with the increasing availability of literature through print. By means of the anthology, publishers promise readers that they can master high culture and, by implication, rise in a society ideally figured as a neutral realm.
[¶48.] In order for readers to participate in the rarified realm of literary culture through stylistic evaluation, however, they are told that they need mediators or guides. These printers and booksellers provide through three different kinds of anthologies. Anthologies of university poetry form one central method of tendering classical translation to an audience unversed in Latin or Greek. In publicizing the private cultural productions of a select group within the wider literary culture, these compendia establish the literary authority of the elite. They bridge manuscript and printed culture as well as private and professional publication. The rival, professional literary coterie, led by Dryden and fostered by his publisher Tonson, use the prestige of the nobility to define fashionable taste. Through the series of Dryden's Miscellanies, they establish the role of the editor in mediating literary culture. At the same time, the editors Bysshe and Gildon publish guides to writing poetrythat also teach reading and aesthetic evaluation. These anthologies simultaneously unify literary culture and discriminate among the "variety" of writers, readers, and literary styles.
[¶49.] In the struggle for cultural dominance during the late seventeenth century, classical Greek and Latin texts rose as marks of fashionable education and sophistication.72 Although these were not the only forms of literary language people read, they denoted a university education or, at least, a refined taste.73 -This taste in turn denoted social power. Writers or readers who could boast intimate knowledge of the cultural trophies of Horace, Catullus, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Homer, Virgil, and other classical authors could excel at extempore tests of wit, arbitrate between poetic translations, and simulate patrons.74 Even the educational revolutionary John Locke had identified Latinas the language of diplomacy and international relations.75 By exhibiting expertise in classical translation, readers demonstrated their cultural power, their class.
[¶50.] University collections also served a social purpose. By commemorating the halcyon days of masculine friendship within the university, they formed a bond for boys or men separated as they entered the broader society, as evidenced by poems about gossip, drinking, and womanizing. As exercises in form, moreover, these collections of amateur verses declared the educational and cultural unity of their audience. They helped to establish standards by which their authors themselves constituted an exclusive society. At the same time, these compilations vaunt the richness of the school culture from which they grow. Featuring translations of well-known Latin poems, they emphasize the contributors' stylistic virtuosity; the plenitude of versions and genres highlights the individuality of each contribution. It is not the difficulty of the Latin but the grace of the English that testifies to the translator's talents. While defining cultural literacy according to pedagogical models, these anthologies also proclaim the social and literary power of their patrons. Since they penetrate the book market, the education and taste of all the school's alumni, not merely the contributors, is advertised. Such advertisement also reinscribes the exclusivity of the university's members by making their translations, their education, and their taste the touchstone of culture. These public manifestation of common taste, moreover, buttressed the personal intimacies that controlled much of social and political life. For example, the five-part Oxford Drollery, signed J.C. (1671; reprint, 1679) announces that it has been produced at the request of Oxford friends; the contents include colloquia, extempore poems, jokes, and songs. Again in 1684, Verses by the University of Oxford on the Death of Sir Bevill Grenvill uses the university's name to advertise the quality of the community and its verse.76
[¶51.] The volume Miscellany Poems and Translations. By Oxford Hands, issued by the bookseller Anthony Stephens the year after Tonson's Miscellany Poems of 1684, illustrates the association between university translations and general literary culture as contrived by a professional of the book trade. Opening with translations, "Love Verses," and two "Pindarick Odes" by F. Willis, it contains short, colloquial translations of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, and Seneca, with other occasional verses and songs.77 -Subtitles within the text separate genres, as in a book catalog. This format enforces the claim of "variety" with which Stephens prefaces the book, despite its consistency of theme and diction. Moreover, Stephens claims that "such variety of Subjects cannot but be grateful, and a Miscellany must needs yield more delight then one continued Poem; for the same reason I presume, as at an Entertainment, most People are pleas'd with variety of Courses, when a standing Dish would not at all gratify their Appetites."78 Working the traditional metaphor of the miscellany, Stephens equates the book with a public celebration.
[¶52.] At the same time, Stephens underscores his patrician sources. Thanking the "several Hands which have been so kind to oblige the world . . . as much as me, in contributing to this piece," he maintains that their authority guarantees the quality of the collection: "I have relyed wholy upon the Authority of able Criticks; to whom I left it wholy to approve, or disapprove of what they pleas'd; knowing it to be a prudent way for any one who understands not whether a Coin be counterfeit, to refer himself to the Test of a Touchstone: whereupon I admitted no Coppy but what had stood this Tryal, and came of with reputation." Since poetry contains mysterious value, Stephens turns literary judgment over to experts, while he, in order "to divert and please" the audience by supplying them with the "Poetry" that has become "the favourite of the Age," has "made it his business To Serve You." His advertisements at the end of the volume list several other Oxford translations, including Creech's renditions of Lucretius, Theocritus, and Horace, Willis's translations of Anacreon, and "Cor. Nepos. done into English by several Hands in the University of Oxford." He sells elite literature to the general public as simultaneously classical and modern.
[¶53.] University miscellanies prompted other collections of verse celebrating the wit of in-groups, but when produced by amateurs these seldom flourished. In 1697, Tom Brown parodied these practices in a mock-periodical dedicated to a powerful patron, Miscellanies over Claret, or the Friends to the Tavern the Best Friends to Poetry. Being a Collection of Poems, Translations, &c. to be continued Monthly from the Rose-Tavern without Temple-Bar.79 Ostensibly issued by a set of rollicking young lawyers, this pamphlet satirizes both academic and Whiggish literary politics. Its obsequious dedication to the current earl of Dorset and the lord chamberlain confesses--even boasts--of the members' drunkenness, carelessness, lack of talent, and dependence, ritualistically deplores the poverty of writers in the current age, and begs for cash immediately by the hand of the postboy. Brown thus burlesques the conditions of literary success at the end of the seventeenth century, even while his formula, if encouraged, could easily have slid into a successful periodical publication.
[¶54.] Tom Brown (1663-1704) demonstrates a genius for providing a miscellany to feed the appetite of the moment. Himself educated at Oxford, he exhibited the kind of wit miscellanies promote, spouting as a schoolboy the extemporaneous translation of Martial's epigram, "I do not love thee, Dr. Fell." A Tory hack, he also contributed to the literary scene with a high number of poetical and prose collections, many published after his death, including several editions of a ballad collection (1686-1726); the popular- Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1700); The Catch Club or Merry Companions being a Choice Collection of the most Diverting Catches (1720); a periodical called The Gentleman's Journal: or the Monthly Miscellany (1692-1694); and A Collection of Miscellany Poems and Letters (1699).80 After attacking Dryden under a pseudonym in "The Reasons of Mr. Bays' changing his Religion . . . ," he launched The Lacedaemonian Mercury in 1691, which failed to rival Dunton's newspaper, before starting his mock-periodical Miscellanies over Claret in March 1697. One of the first miscellaneous writers to combine prose and poetry in anthologies, he produced A Collection of Miscellany Poems, Letters &c. by Mr. Brown Etc. in London, 1699, and the popular Amusements Serious and Comical Calculated for the Meridian of London satirizing London society in the French tradition in 1700, as well as compendia of political letters later in the century.81
[¶55.] In Miscellanies over Claret, Brown burlesques editors' and booksellers' commercial patter with prurient innuendo. Like other miscellanies, this one invites "ALL Gentlemen or Ladies" to subscribe and promises material for common tastes:
But to the business in hand, as the Man said to the Young Woman, when he had got something in it that should not be there. . . . As for the pleasing the Female Readers Palate, we should indeed have taken care for some pretty soft thing or other for them; but since we are utterly uncapable of those nice performances, (as the Ladies would judge by our Garb were they to see us) we desire to be excus'd for that omission in this; but as peices of that nature come to our hands we shall take care to oblige the fair Sex with them in our next.
[¶57.] The scanty contents comprise two mock-panegyrics, one to Thomas, earl of Pembroke and the other to Sir Joseph Williamson: "The Oxford Laureat," which recounts the scandalous anecdote of a poetry professor's legacy for a single, poorly researched lecture, to which the preface alludes; and an "imitation of the 65 Epig. 12 Book of Martial." These topical satires attack the social and literary corruptions of a contemporary culture that encouraged an unmonitored scramble for fame by would-be wits.
[¶58.] As university anthologies assumed the function of defining literary culture, printers and booksellers in London began to issue them, and this gave rising authors a chance to become popular. A year before Tonson's sixth and last volume of Dryden's Miscellanies, which included Pope's Pastorals, and three years before his own renowned Miscellany Poems and Translations, Bernard Lintot financed an elite anthology that, eschewing overt politics, grafted the prestige of university translations onto the fashion for light verse. The finely produced Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems (1708), adorned with a classicizing frontispiece and edited by Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), demonstrates the way the form purveyed contemporary aesthetics.82 This book made Fenton's career.83 After publishing it, he attracted Bolingbroke's attention, served as tutor to Lord Orrery's son, Lord Broghill (1714), and, by virtue of Pope's support, was appointed as the literary instructor of the new secretary of state, Craggs.84 Fenton later prefixed "a short and elegant" account of Milton's life to an edition of Milton's works and "amended" the punctuation of Paradise Lost; and in 1729, he annotated an edition of Waller.
[¶59.] Like other university anthologies, Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems features accolades to particular authors and books that help to reconcile oppositions of politics and fashion and to establish taste. Including verses by Prior, Sir John Denham, Purcell, Otway, Milton, the duke of Buckingham, Duke, Lee, Philips, and Garth, among others, it prints both Milton's "Extempore upon a Faggot" (286-87), which coarsely likens women to green kindling, and Yalden's "On the Reprinting of Mr. Milton's Prose-Works, with his Poems written in his Paradise lost" (177-78). This latter separates Milton's poetic from his political literature:
These sacred Lines with wonder we peruse,
And praise the Flights of a seraphick Muse:
Till thy seditious Prose provokes our Rage,
And spoils the Beauties of thy brightest page.
(177)
[¶61.] This poem represents Milton as a master of style, not subject. Fenton's other selections confirm the preeminence of classical style as the cultural value of the volume.
[¶62.] In his selections and organization, Fenton's Miscellany establishes particular aesthetic values for contemporary verse. Despite its profusion of short, light pieces, these allusions, the lofty diction of many of the poems, and the scrupulous adherence to generic form demand more literary information and serious attention than does the poetry of Stephens's collection. Fenton follows two principles. He selects verses that preserve generic integrity in meter, metaphor, and diction, but he organizes these verses in striking contrast to one another. Such principles illustrate the variety within the mode of classical imitation that unifies the more than 122 love poems, drinking songs, translations, parodies, satires, and Horatian tributes to moderation, friendship, and retreat.85 Lintot advertises the volume's classicism by a frontispiece portraying a temple in which the bearded god of the river Cam pours full waters into the reader's lap opposite the goddess Isis.86
[¶63.] In organization, Fenton imitates Dryden's format by beginning with his own long masterpiece, the highly popular "Florelio, a Pastoral, lamenting the Death of the late Marquis of Blandford." This smooth elegy exploits assonance, alliteration, and metrical precision in accordance with its genre, thus setting the aesthetic values for the rest of the volume.87 Many of the other classical imitations echo the anaphora, pastoral imagery, and traditional epithets of this poem. For contrast, Fenton follows his elegy with a "Song" that is different in meter, imagery, and theme and exemplifies an alternative classical mode satirizing women's hypocrisy. Here, Olivia's affected saintliness conceals natural sin, so her fiery "Tail" or sexual organ awaits the night to rear from its "Thicket." Appearing in the same context as reverent "paraphrases" of biblical verses and parables, these verses do not present the anthology as furnishing a coherent or serious morality. Rather, readers are invited to admire the different ways in which form and tone are manipulated. The polymorphous linguistic display suggests that culture is all a matter of style.88
[¶64.] As late as 1731, Miscellany of Poems. By several Hands, edited by J. Husbands, A.M., demonstrates by its method of production the role of this genre in literature. An Oxford anthology compiled by a member of the university to raise funds, it was sold by subscription, as the nineteen-page list of subscribers documents.89 The copy at the University of Virginia features a contemporary bookplate indicating that R. Finch of Balliol College, Oxford, bought the book, although his name is not on the list.90 Although this is slight evidence, it does suggest that university members were among the primary customers for such volumes. In celebrating the literary culture of the Oxford elite, Husbands attempts to reform poets, readers, and literature by restoring the classical taste Oxford purveys in place of the contemporary poetry that he condemns as morally improper. All his contributors are Oxbridge men who have translated religious or classical verse.91 Among them is Samuel Johnson, a sometime Oxford student and later proponent of literary authority and classical correctness, first propelled into print here through his translation of Pope's Messiah, as well as his Latin verse "London."
[¶65.] In this eighteenth-century collection, Husbands adopts a system of moral and aesthetic ranking typical of the critics of his period, but only just beginning to interest writers of the Restoration. Husbands's authors represent piety in opposition to contemporary fashion. After comparing "heathen" ancients with modern wits who follow licentious fashion, Husbands praises religious poetry for its claims on the imagination and chronicles the progress of poesy as it becomes an "Art" under the growth of "Politeness." Topic as well as manner determines proper poetry:
In the Pieces of a lighter Nature, or amorous Tendency, Every Thing is industriously avoided that might call up Blushes into the Virgin's Cheek, or offend the most Reserv'd. By this scrupulous Delicacy I am sensible that the Miscellany has lost what some Persons would have esteemed its most shining Embellishments. But in the Opinion of One, whom they will allow to be a good Judge,[¶67.] *--Want of Modesty is want of Sense.
[¶68.] In reiterating this opposition between vulgar and refined literature, Husbands's preface presents the poetry in the volume as a triumph of stylistic and moral progress. Such discourse defines the reader of this elite culture as similarly elite in moral character and literary taste. This use of university anthologies to redefine literary fashion continues throughout the century. In the later eighteenth century, such collections as The Oxford Sausage; or, select poetical pieces written by the most celebrated wits of the University of Oxford, edited by the distinguished poet and critic Thomas Warton (1728-1790), perform the same function of using academic authority to promote new authors, topics, and styles.92
[¶69.] The most successful Restoration collections, however, still combined classical and contemporary verse, and indeed defined cultural literacy as the knowledge of both traditions.93 Jacob Tonson (1656[?]-1736) proves this by his six volumes of Miscellany Poems, of which Dryden edited the first two, issued in 1684 and 1685, the second entitled Sylvae. The third appeared in 1693 as Examen Poeticum, and the fourth in 1694 as The Annual Miscellany: for the Year 1694, bearing a frontispiece of the muse holding a cornucopia of rich fruits and flowers (see fig. 1 in the introduction); Nicholas Rowe edited the last two, in 1704 and 1709. For the first time, a publisher had sustained a series of anthologies over more than a decade, while keeping the earlier volumes in print. Still more significant, Tonson had managed this while the reputation of the poet on whose work he had founded the enterprise, John Dryden, foundered and sank. G. F. Papali argues that the light translations and contemporary dramatic and occasional verses gratified the mixed appetite of readers in a period of transition "between the decadence of Elizabethan exuberance and the birth of classicism."94 Equally important, the prologues and epilogues in the volumes rhetorically identify the reading audience with a theatrical audience defined as "a refined, cosmopolitan public."95 This enterprise demonstrates the power of anthologies, if not to canonize, at least to establish contemporary authors, coteries, works, and aesthetic principles beyond the moment of the publication. If Tonson did not, as Geduld claims, "invent" the literary miscellany, he certainly helped to redefine it as a vehicle for literary culture aimed at highbrow as well as popular audiences.96 Helped by these publications, Dryden became a poet with a popular draw unlike any previously seen in literature.97 The Miscellanies sold Dryden to a popular audience, establishing him as a living "classic," yet, by supplementing them with new volumes and reissuing the whole, reorganized and differently presented in 1716, Tonson also recontextualized Dryden for new readers. Since this vehicle helped to publicize Dryden's definition of the reader's subjectivity as "internally disciplined," classically educated, and receptive to both erotic imitation and abstract allegory, Tonson's compendia established the printed anthology as a haven for high literature and transformed it from an occasional venture into an authoritative collection.98
[¶70.] Tonson's organization invites readers to pass aesthetic judgments. Each volume contains roughly fifty poems (except the first, with twice that number), but the volumes vary their proportions of original works to translations, reflecting a dip in the taste for translations after 1685.99 By presenting several versions of classical poems, Dryden and Tonson implicitly license readers unacquainted with the original to rate it; he also equates the English translations with the ancient texts. The different forms of song, ode, elegy, epigram, epistle, eclogue, and so on appear juxtaposed to contrast different stylistic treatments of the same themes of love and beauty. In this context, excerpts from long historical or epic accounts stand as further examples of the classical ethic. The first volume, indeed, contextualizes contemporary poems in a classical context by its subtitle, Containing a New Translation of Virgill's Eclogues, Ovid's Love Elegies, Odes of Horace, And Other Authors; with Several Original Poems. By the most Eminent Hands, and its two sections of Ovidian elegies and Horatian odes.100 Like Behn's Miscellany, however, it begins with serious contemporary work--Mac Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel, and The Medal, all published in 1682--and concludes with a reissue of a separate publication, Virgils Eclogues. Translated by Several Hands. It also contains prologues and epilogues by Dryden, with other original verse by Thomas Creech, Sir Charles Sedley, Thomas Rymer, George Stepney, Nahum Tate, the earl of Roscommon, Richard Duke, Thomas Otway, and Knightley Chetwood. By framing the contemporary works within the context of classical translations, Tonson imposes a uniformity on his miscellaneous collection that emphasizes genre over topic.
[¶71.] Although as an introduction Mac Flecknoe proclaims a political agenda that the later translations can be seen to support, it also invites a particular kind of reading which encourages the close attention to language that the anthology promotes. Stephen N. Zwicker has observed that Dryden's metaphorical discourse speaks of the historical necessity for a language of disguise, due both to the political heritage of royalist Cavaliers who conspired against the Commonwealth, and to theories of language as an arbitrary, not God-given, set of correlations between words and things.101 In the context of the collection, the poem also asks for careful reading. For example, the pun on "not even" reinforces its representatively uneven meter by eliding the second e: "St. Andre's feet ne'er kept more equal time, / Not ev'n the feet of thy own Psyche's rhime." The slights against unfit rule, favoritism, and foolishness gain force from visual and aural puns, as in the depiction of the "Prince" wielding papers in his "threshing Hand," a pun on "thrashing" as a violent separation of wheat from chaff. Several phrases allude to buried clichés: "supinely reign" plays off "supremely reign," as "thoughtless Majesty" satirizes the conceit of natural rulership. Even the sneer "So just, so like tautology they fell" implies a satire not only against the circular reasoning of justification by faith but also against the endowing of monarchy with instinctive majesty, as well as divine right.102 Thematically, also, the poem gratifies a local audience by describing and naming London locations while lambasting self-appointed, false high culture with scatological allusions.
[¶72.] Language is itself a vital topic in the poem. The references to literary culture, especially kinds of verse and bad plays, highlight the aesthetic mix of the volume and advertise the quality of Dryden's theatrical and satirical works. Certain lines and printing conventions reinforce this advertisement. For example, the line "And Panton waging harmless War with words" is a double entendre that emphasizes the double-edged nature of language: Panton at once fails to wound with the weapon he has, words, and also wars only with harmless weapons. It is worth noting that this phrase refers to the earlier, Miltonic line "And rage immortal War with Wit"; Tonson adds Milton's Lycidas to the 1716 reissue, reinforcing this poem's intertextuality. Readers thus learn critical attitudes to poetic language.
[¶73.] The evidence for such a topical reading of the poem can be found in the changes that Tonson made in the reissued version of 1716. The edition of Mac Flecknoe printed in Miscellany Poems differs only very slightly from the 1682 version, but the differences between Dryden's apparently careful editing of the 1684 edition and Tonson's work with the 1716 edition are significant. While most of these merely reflect different printing, spelling, and punctuation conventions, a few indicate changes of meaning.103 The 1716 uses more capitals, a technique that helps readers--especially relatively uneducated readers--to locate meaning.104 For example, it capitalizes "Issue" in line 8, adding a pun on "issues" of texts as well as on progeny, and quite possibly alluding to the "issues" of Tonson's miscellany themselves.105 The later edition has "Aston-Hall" whereas the earlier has "A_
[¶74.] Typographical differences between earlier editions of Absalom and Achitophel and the Miscellany edition also suggest that the political context was veiled or de-emphasized, as far as possible with so polemical a piece. The 1684 edition reads: "Began to dream they wanted Liberty," lending liberty an abstract meaning, whereas the 1681 edition prints the more specific "liberty," for example. Oral punctuation persists, if slightly modified: in 1681, two blank lines head Shaftesbury's (Achitophel's) speech: "Auspicious Prince!" and the 1684 Miscellany retains the spacing but deletes the exclamation mark. In the 1692 edition, however, both spaces and exclamation mark vanish, as they do in 1716.106 Deleting lines also saves space, of course, and might reduce cost (the 1716 edition was indeed less expensive), but this change would save little paper. The differences in printing style reflect more than economics. By separating speeches from narrative with blank lines, the earlier editions emphasize the oral character of the speeches. This, in turn, creates two effects. It highlights the specific characterization of each of the speakers--a prefatory letter praises Dryden's "dialect"--and links this poem with the other oral forms in the collection: songs, prologues, and epilogues. The gradual shift from the oral emphasis of the speech to the printed medium may correspond to different interpretations of the poem whereby the speech becomes more intimately interwoven with the rest of the poet's declamation and thus, perhaps, serves as general satire rather than a specific characterization. This would accord with the increasing temporal distance between the audience reading this material and the historical circumstances. Correspondingly, Dryden's final satires, The Medal and Absalom and Achitophel, both attacks on Shaftesbury, do not survive later editions, although The Medal employs an elaborate metaphor that involves the entire city of London, again the prime audience for Tonson's collection.107 -Indeed, two prefatory poems that commend Dryden's politics more than his versification are omitted in the 1709 and 1716 versions.108
[¶75.] Treatments of aesthetic judgment replace overtly political themes. After Dryden's three satires, the volume turns to a section of Ovid's elegies that celebrates the power of love.109 This section matches parallel translations, several by Dryden's rival, Thomas Creech, to allow stylistic comparison: for example, two versions of the eighth elegy deploring the chambermaid's confession to her mistress. Some poems praise Dryden directly, like the earl of Roscommon's "On Mr. Dryden's Religio Laici." These supply the reader with terms in which to evaluate the poetry. A high number of prologues and epilogues also discuss literacy. Two of Dryden's prologues to the University of Oxford define an audience enjoying a cultural authority equivalent to the king's: "Kings make their Poets whom themselves think fit, / But 'tis your Suffrage makes Authentique wit" (Silent Woman, 265). The audience's sincerity accords them regal power. The second prologue from 1674 similarly treats the reciprocity between author and audience: "Poets, your Subjects, have their Parts assign'd, / T'unbend, and to divert their Sovereign's mind" (267). Citing Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson, it identifies traditional literature with popular drama; it also defines an ideal audience differentiated from the rabble in the pit. This prologue presents Dryden as a cultural judge who embodies refinement.110 Still another prologue criticizes theater-goers for failing to locate thefts of old pieces, shifting the authority for literary purity and justice to the audience. These theatrical works transform topical into aesthetic issues, civic questions into matters of cultural politics, and, reprinted in an anthology, reinforce the mutation of poetic subject from social action to literary convention. The audience's responsibility becomes the guardianship of culture rather than the reform of the state. This poetry thus helps to neutralize political innuendo.
[¶76.] Contextualized in a collection, this theatrical verse, indeed, authorizes readers to become, through their identification with the conjured audience, part of the literary world. Prologues and epilogues are a new and important contribution to the anthology, as prominent as other poems of classical genre--epistles praising the countryside, elegies on the deaths of famous people, and the like--but this new context alters their meaning. The closing and reopening of the playhouses, perhaps more than anything else, symbolized the relationship between politics and literature for Restoration audiences: the previous censorship of the stage itself, not merely of what was enacted upon it, endued plays and their speeches with a royalist flavor. It is not, therefore, surprising to find prologues and epilogues in an anthology headed by Dryden. What is revolutionary is the juxtaposition of so many of these examples of extemporaneous English wit with translations from high classical culture. The particular examples of theatrical verse, moreover, as above, often reverse the Restoration cliché of ruler and ruled in characterizing the relationship between audience and author--a conventional theme of such theatrical pieces since the Renaissance. Where Rochester, composing poems in manuscript, claimed that he wrote as he willed, these theatrical writers aver that they obey the town. This play verse represents power as resting in the judgment of the audience, just as qualitative decisions about classical translations do. Transposed into an anthology, such rhetoric constructs the reader as the touchstone of fashionable taste. The political innuendos of theatrical verse have been transferred to the individual relations between reader and text.
[¶77.] Tonson, furthermore, blunts political associations by increasingly publishing poetry about private experience. As Geduld explains, the last volumes feature more domestic, sensational, and sexual poems.111 While plundering the classical authors and employing a stable of contemporary ones, Tonson also borrowed material from other Restoration poets and from popular publications, taking forty songs, ballads, and pre-Restoration poems from Wit and Drollery, The Garden of Good Will, Parnassus Biceps, The Loyal Garland, and anonymous collections.112 As Raymond D. Havens points out, Tonson was "democratizing a hitherto esoteric anthology."113 Suckling, "Chevy Chase," Marvell, Carew, minor Milton, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Donne, Heywood, Wither, Cowley, and Waller crowd the pages. In this combination of poets from two generations, indeed three with the inclusion of Philips and Pope, Tonson leads the way for collections that commingle contemporary and traditional works. Moreover, by reissuing all six volumes in 1716 as a tiny series, further edited to delete outdated material, Tonson leveled this literary culture for a wide readership.
[¶78.] While university anthologies and Dryden's Miscellanies were mediating between audiences by selling classicism as contemporary fashion, other editors were publishing pedagogical compendia that trained readers to write poetry themselves, as well as admire it. By teaching techniques of poetic composition while including exemplary cribs from modern authors, these books disseminated contemporary poetic values and linked poetic mastery--whether by writing or by reading--with cultural education. As treatises on the unique characteristics of English verse, moreover, they also began to define a distinctive poetic national identity. From the Renaissance, writers had sought to determine the standards and characteristics of English verse. Late in Elizabethan times, for example, Thomas Campion argued against native meter and for classical forms in Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), prompting Samuel Daniel's advocacy of naturalistic poetry in A Defence of Ryme the following year.114 Daniel contended that, although ornamental, rhyme resists excessive poetic laws and unnatural linguistic devices while requiring imaginative effort, helping the reader's memory, and giving shape to verse (7-11). Using these arguments, in 1657 the schoolmaster Josua Poole put together The English Parnassus, a native grammar including a commonplace book to teach his students to compose poetry. This provided the format and argument for Edward Bysshe's successful Art of English Poetry (1702). As A. Dwight Culler has noted, "whereas the English Parnassus was designed for the schoolroom, the Art of English Poetry was designed for the world of polite letters, and so may be called the first example in English of the handbook for the serious poet." This book, however, invites readers as well as writers to learn not only literary method but quotations and categories.115
[¶79.] Like Poole's handbook, Bysshe's Art of English Poetry represents poetry as cultural power. It includes three sections: a prose explanation of poetic rules with examples, a "Dictionary of Rhymes," and the long "Collection of the most Natural, Agreeable, and Noble Thoughts, viz. Allusions, Similes, Descriptions, and Characters, of Persons and Things; that are to be found in the best English Poets."116 This commonplace book proved the most popular part of the collection. Although the book ran through nine editions, four revised, only two editions were revised extensively, in 1705 and 1708.117 In the first of these editions, Bysshe added 671 new passages to the "Collection," a third again as many as he had; in 1708, he added another 394; in all subsequent editions, he stresses the commonplace section in his preface. From the first edition, Bysshe, anticipating his descendant Shelley, maintains that choice in poetry shows cultural superiority, since the poetic judge "must be of an elevated Mind, founded on a great compass of Knowledge, on a generous Education, on reading of the best Authors, and on a conversation with men of the first Rank and Fortunes: All which must concur to give him that Readiness and clearness of Apprehension, that Fire and Just Taste of what is Natural and Great, that Elegance and Depth of Thought; in a Word, that happy Turn of Soul and Race of Judgement, which distinguishes him from the Vulgar in every thing he Speaks and Acts" (ii). Both writers and readers of poetry, especially selected poetry, thus embody high culture.
[¶80.] Bysshe clarifies in his dedication that this superiority characterizes readers as well as poets. While he admits that his rules will help only those already gifted in composition, he also outlines the ways in which his collection can reward casual readers. Using the familiar metaphor of a feast, he likens his book to a miscellany, accessible to readers with little time or concentration:
[¶82.] These readers may peruse the book for light entertainment. As authors or readers, moreover, they may use the commonplace book as a reference to passages already familiar, and as a contemplative aid.
[¶83.] It is style, however, above all that Bysshe identifies as the virtue of this art. While including "both Pro and Con" of every "Subject," he suggests, perhaps in reference to the selections by Behn, that appropriate words sanitize thoughts: "And tho' here and there a Thought may perhaps have a Cast of Wantonness, yet the cleanly metaphors palliate the Broadness of the meaning, and the Chastness of the Works qualifies the Lasciviousness of the Images they represent" (x-xi). Severed from their context, the selections could be seen to advocate anything--rebellion, promiscuity, license, self-indulgence, lawlessness--but Bysshe values stylistic elegance over political or moral implication. In his role as mediator, he thus eschews his own moral judgment: "I have not always chosen what I most approv'd, but what carries with it the best Stroaks for Imitation," he avows, since "it was not my Business to judge any farther, than of the Vigour and Force of Thought, of the Purity of Language, of the Aptness and Propriety of Expression; and above all, of the Beauty of Colouring, in which the Poet's Art chiefly consists" (xi). By this assertion, Bysshe defines poetry as a professional skill severed from moral judgment--the principles governing the organization and contents of Fenton's Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems (1708), and galvanizing Husbands's attempt to reform poetry to include morality in A Miscellany of Poems, By Several Hands (1731).
[¶84.] Despite its enormous popularity, Bysshe's was not the only guide to composition and literary culture. In 1718, the professional editor Charles Gildon (1665-1724) issued The Complete Art of Poetry, a two-volume combination of rule book and commonplace collection that, Culler observes, copies two-thirds of its quotations from Bysshe.118 Gildon, however, supplements Bysshe's nationalistic discourse with neoclassical terms that define literary consumption as refinement. Returning to the moral rationale of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1595) in his dedication to King George, Gildon claims poetry as "the most noble, most ancient, and most useful of all Arts, as that is so nearly concern'd in the forming [of] the Manners, and refining the Spirit of your People." Citing Aristotle, Horace, Boileau, Buckingham, Dennis, and others, he elevates criticism to the rank of an ancient art. In reproving Bysshe for overvaluing "Coloring," he defines the essence of the "Poet's Art" as, like that of the painter, "Design." This Aristotelian criterion accords oddly with a work predicated on extracting passages from longer works, but Gildon ignores this contradiction. Rather, he claims that, unlike Bysshe, he does not aim to teach writing, but "to give the Reader the great Images that are to be found in those of our Poets, who are truly great, as well as their Topics and Moral Reflections." Gildon, in other words, extracts literary culture for the reader, whereas he characterizes Bysshe as extracting it for writers. His neoclassical discourse ranks reading, criticism, and perception of the general "design" above writing.
[¶85.] Gildon specifically solicits an audience without learning but with good sense. The education that he promises to provide includes "Homer, Virgil, and the rest of the Antients" as well as contemporary and recent English poets. In this definition, he opposes another discourse in contemporary culture. In 1714, four years before his Complete Art of Poetry was published, John Brightland had published A Grammar of the English Tongue, designed for lower-rank schools, sold by an enormous conger of booksellers including Tonson, Knaplock, Nicholson, and Bell, and running to several editions. Comprising a calendar calculation table, a grammar with notes, and a guide to punctuation, meter, diction, and genre, it also featured an advertising panegyric by then-laureate Nahum Tate lauding the dissemination of English culture on "Terms so cheap" to the "lowest Stations" and "meanest Britons."119 - Tate's rhetoric associates national power and progress with national advancement in poetry. In his version of the battle of the books, Gildon supplements this association of the progress of civilization with contemporary culture.120 His compendium teaches cultural advancement as an education in classical as well as native verse.
[¶86.] Restoration anthologies equate classical and contemporary poetry to promote an aesthetic evaluation of literature. By the juxtaposition of dramatic and classical verse, by printing styles emphasizing puns and oral jokes, and by a radial organization that assembles texts into thematic clusters, court anthologies by Behn and Dryden, university anthologies, and poetic compendia taught inexperienced readers how to evaluate literature by style. In vaunting variety and balancing political with personal language and themes, these books invited different readers to participate in a celebration of cultural plenty. Restoration collections also promoted a coterie of authors who defined contemporary poetry and quickly disseminated literature and critical theory, offering ways of reading that encouraged comparison and contrast. The popularity of stylistic as well as topical literary allusion in the organization and contents of anthologies, spurred by the fame of Dryden and his kind of verse, characterized high culture as the knowledge of literature and fostered the desire for a ranking of authors and works from the past--for a canon. By bridging political and personal discourse, these compendia offered identification with public life through reading.
1 Love, Scribal Publication.
2 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 80.
3 See Backscheider, Spectacular Politics.
4 Ezell, "The Gentleman's Journal," 339.
5 Howe, "The Stationers' Company Almanacks," 196-202.
6 Ezell, "The Gentleman's Journal," 340.
7 For an analysis of the influence of classical paradigms on the verse of this period, see Lord, Classical Presences, which particularly traces the replacement of personal, lyrical expressions in poetry by the public rhetorical mode.
8 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 52.
9 Zwicker, "Lines of Authority," 231; McKeon, "Politics of Discourses," 45.
10 Thompson, "The Puritans and Prurience," 36-65.
11 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 51.
12 Small, The Printed Word, 35.
13 McKenzie, The London Book Trade, 30-33.
14 Thormählen examines Rochester's fluidity of meaning in the context of the Restoration court, particularly his satirical violations of expectations and his balance of innuendo and stability, in Rochester, 5, passim.
15 Crane, Framing Authority, 4, 180-81, 198.
16 See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination; also, Burke, Popular Culture, 178-204.
17 Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, 228.
18 Hammond, Fleeting Things, 292.
19 Sterling Memorial Library. CBEL records this with a slightly different title "1660 to 1640" published in 1660, 1661, and 1662. It was republished the same year and reissued two years later as Rump: Or an Exact Collection Of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times. By the most Eminent Wits, from Anno 1639 to Anno 1661.
20 Jack, Augustan Satire, 3.
21 In English Burlesque Poetry, Bond defines burlesque as "indirect satire" achieved by incongruity, arguing that the urbanity of Pope's age required burlesque in place of Horatian and Juvenalian invective (3, 227).
22 For a discussion of this structure of desire, see Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; also Roussel, The Conversation of the Sexes, esp. 32.
23 London: Hobart Kemp, 1672. Mills Memorial Library. This collection, according to the CBEL, was reissued in 1673, 1693, 1695, 1701, 1702, and 1716.
24 In refuting Vieth's "modernized" edition, Walker argues convincingly in The Poems of John Wilmot that the typographical variations of different editions indicate different meanings or connotations for words, although Walker examines only verses by Rochester (xv). See also Vieth's Complete Poems of John Wilmot and Ellis's notes to the Penguin Complete Works. I have used these editions as well as the original sources for this chapter.
25 Farley-Hills, Rochester's Poetry, 45-46. Farley-Hills sees no punning indecencies in these poems.
26 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755). See also Zwicker, "Lines of Authority," 236, and Love, Scribal Publication, 270-77.
27 Rochester had to fly the court for handing it to the king; see Walker, The Poems of John Wilmot, 270.
28 Quaintance, "French Sources of the Restoration `Imperfect Enjoyment' Poem." See also Quaintance, "Passion and Reason in Restoration Love Poetry," 158-213.
29 For an illuminating discussion of the function of theatrical verse to define groups, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 85.
30 Smith points out in Literary Love that the poetry of the earlier seventeenth century attempted to bridge the gap of spiritual and carnal reality, but this verse primarily used divine rather than political metaphors and did not approach the "public" role (181, passim).
31 For the political implications of treatments of body and property in love poetry, see Malcolmson, "The Garden Enclosed / The Woman Enclosed."
32 Clark, English Society, 1688-1832, 127.
33 Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 85-87, 145.
34 Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry. Foxon notes the high number of Rochester's works that have survived, indicating perhaps his dual status as high culture and pornography; see Libertine Literature, 4. Griffin notes that Tonson censors Rochester's verses in the 1691 compendium (Satires against Man, 81).
35 Greenslade, "Affairs of State," 92-110, esp. 101-3, and Everett, "The Sense of Nothing," 5. In "Rochester and the `Holiday Writers,'" Griffin observes that most of Rochester's aristocratic contemporaries, like him, were not interested in political events (38). Love notes the few political lampoons in Rochester's collection in Scribal Publication (259-60).
36 See Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit; Thormählen also treats biographical matters in Rochester. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, 5. Vieth traces the history of Rochester's publications, noting that the second volume of Buckingham's Miscellaneous Works, entitled Poems on Affairs of State, became a source for critics ascribing poems to Rochester. The publication history of this volume describes a typical course, albeit Poems on Affairs of State retained its popularity unusually long. Jacob Tonson lifted from it for his 1691 edition of Rochester's Poems, Etc. on Several Occasions as did Edmund Curll for his 1707 edition of Rochester's and Roscommon's Works (13). See Love, Scribal Publication, 231-83.
37 In Libertine Literature, Foxon points out that "pornography" is often linked to political or cultural rebellion (50).
38 Reyner, Poems on Several Occasions: with Valentinian; a Tragedy. Written by the Right Honourable John, late Earl of Rochester (London: Jacob Tonson, 1705), preface, i-ii. Huntington Library.
39 In The Formal Strain, Weinbrot has observed that whereas John Dennis had praised Rochester's fidelity to Boileau in Miscellanies in Verse and Prose in 1693, modern readers have noted his originality and freedom of imitation (47-49).
40 Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry.
41 In Satires against Man, Griffin notes Rochester's subversiveness and mockery of heroism (29, 50); Thormählen, Rochester, 95-97, 141.
42 See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; also Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
43 Everett, "The Sense of Nothing," 26.
44 Griffin reads the "two lovely boys" as an "openly admitted" homosexual reference; nonetheless, the shock potential of this reference seems slight (Satires against Man, 123). Ellis notes that this is an imitation of Ronsard's Ode à Vulcan. Pris d'Anacreon in Complete Works, 335.
45 See Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, 103-36; Walker, The Poems of John Wilmot, 293-94; Griffin particularly notes the ambiguity in this poem in Satires against Man, 69, 72
46 Griffin, "Rochester and the `Holiday Writers,'" 38-41.
47 Although her editorship has not been verified, no one has confuted the persuasive evidence of Thorn-Drury; see Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, 138; also Todd, The Works of Aphra Behn, 1:xviii.
48 Mendleson, The Mental World of Stuart Women, 126.
49 See Woodcock, Aphra Behn, 65-67; Duyfhuizen, "`That Which I Dare Not Name,'" 73. For Behn's publications, see O'Donnell, Aphra Behn; Todd, The Works of Aphra Behn.
50 Thorn-Drury, A Little Ark, vi.
51 Among the many treatments of Behn's gendering discourse, see Mermin, "Women Becoming Poets," esp. 336; Pearson, The Prostituted Muse, 142-68. For a treatment of women's authorial prestige, see Gallagher, Nobody's Story.
52 Pearson, The Prostituted Muse, 145.
53 Diamond, "Gestus and Signature," esp. 520, 536-37.
54 Woodcock, Aphra Behn, 65-66; Duyfhuizen, "`That Which I Dare Not Name,'" 63-82. In 1684, the volume reappears with the Voyage to the Island of Love appended; Charles Gildon republished Poems upon Several Occasions as Miscellaneous Poems upon Several Occasions in 1692. All other quotations from the volume refer to the first edition of 1672, the Mills Memorial copy.
55 See Pearson, "Gender and Narrative," 44-45.
56 Choice Airs also features works by Dryden, Crowne, Shadwell, Ravenscroft, Henry Neville (Payne), Thomas Dufett, and Joseph Arrowsmith, among others. See Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, 139.
57 Quoted in Woodcock, Aphra Behn, 66; see also 105-6.
58 Ibid., 65-70. This anthology was reprinted in 1928, edited by George Thorn-Drury.
59 For an analysis of early place-name miscellanies, see Benedict, "Consumptive Communities."
60 London: J. Hindmarsh, 1685. Mills Memorial Library.
61 Woodcock, Aphra Behn, 169.
62 Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women, 156; Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, 241-43.
63 Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 36.
64 Bayne-Powell, The English Child, 226.
65 Link, Aphra Behn, 120.
66 Behn indeed was depicted as contributing to this popular genre with A Companion for the ladies'-closets; Or, the Life and Death of the Most Excellent Lady
67 "Licens'd May 21. 1692" (London: Peter Buck, 1692). Mills Memorial Library.
68 Chartier, The Culture of Print, 182.
69 Specialist political miscellanies of "loyal songs" continue to be published throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; for example, Nathaniel Tompson's Collection of 86 loyal poems, all of them written upon the two late plots (London, 1685); Ned Ward's Collection of historical and state poems, satyrs, songs, and epigrams. Being the fifth volume of Miscellanies (London, 1717); and A Collection of loyal songs, poems, Etc. (Edinburgh? 1750), all at Houghton Library at Harvard University.
70 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 61, 99.
71 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 102, 122-23. Stallybrass and White argue that this period marks the definition of the author as above the audience, "in both social and literary terms, superior to his subject," but I locate the social superiority earlier in history, while the superiority to subject entails a superiority to audience that constitutes a reaction in the eighteenth century to the availability of literary culture in print to a wider spectrum of classes.
72 Clark underscores the importance of classical literature for the first half of the century in Samuel Johnson.
73 See Kroll, The Material Word; also Hunter, Before Novels.
74 Milton's Latin exercises, although rarely included in an anthology, have a similar purpose; even Pope's early versifying also echoes this practice and was included in many collections, although obviously not as a testimony to his school since as a Catholic he was barred from university.
75 Tutors often helped students, even Rochester, with their translations: see Cameron, Poems on Affairs of State, 443 n. 29.
76 The tradition of Oxford Wit books includes, advertised in the Term Catalogues 3:621 for 1708, Aesop at Oxford (1s.) and Aesop at Oxford (3:161) sold by John Morphew (1s.).
77 Dr. Fell reorganized the Oxford University Press in Charles II's time to become a model of fine printing and scholarly production; see Clark, Later Stuarts, 398. For this attribution of Brown's work, see Boyce, Tom Brown, 189. I refer to the copies of Miscellany Poems and Translations found at Yale's Sterling Library and at Mills Memorial Library.
78 London: Printed for Anthony Stephens, Bookseller near the Theatre in
79 London and Westminster, 1697. Clark Library.
80 See the bibliography in Boyce's Tom Brown, 189-207.
81 London: John Nutt, 1700. Newberry Library. Reissued in Tom Brown's Amusements Serious and Comical.
82 London, 1708. Lintot advertised this volume in the 1712 Miscellaneous Poems and Translations and published his Poems on Several Occasions in 1717. Fenton's Tragedy of Marianne was priced at 4s. 6d. I have looked at editions at the Clark, Mills Memorial, and Huntington Libraries.
83 Dr. Garth apparently read it, as well as contributing to it; see Sena, The Best-Natured Man, 154-55.
84 When Craggs died suddenly, Pope paid Fenton as his associate three hundred pounds for bks. 1, 4, 19, and 20 of his Odyssey as well as finding him another tutorial post.
85 As is commonly the case with miscellanies, more items appear in the text than the 122 listed in the table of contents.
86 In 1750, The Student: Or, the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany imitates Fenton's collection with a frontispiece of a river god conversing with a maiden against the background of the college spires (2 vols. [Oxford: J. Newbery and J. Barrett, 1750]. Newberry Library). Including two epigraphs by Pindar and Claudian, it demonstrates the taste of the midcentury; it features two indexes at the end differentiating prose and poetry, and includes historical anecdotes, hymns, translations of Horace, and reprinted verses by Sir Walter Raleigh.
87 Unlike later editions, here the two-line chorus that reappears with slight variations after each verse is not italicized, although it is indented from the rest of the text: this printing variation may indicate that this verse is designed to be read rather than spoken.
88 See also the much later Pranceriana. A Select Collection of Fugitive Pieces, Published since the Appointment of the Present Provost of the University of Dublin, published in Dublin in 1775 for 2s. 6d. sewed. Newberry Library.
89 Oxford: Leon. Lichfield, 1731.
90 This depicts a garland surrounding a griffin, with a rule and "
91 Husbands reveals that he has included other pieces: "The two Imitations of Chaucer are Pieces of some considerable Date. They appear'd in Print in the Year 1648 (or perhaps sooner) under the Name of William Nelson. As They are now very scarce, 'twas thought not improper to republish them. These (unless I am deceiv'd) are the only Pieces in the whole Collection that were ever printed before except That entitled, To his Jealous Mistress, an Ode, p. 56, which (as I have heard since the Impression) was publish'd some Years ago. However the Answer to it, falsely entitled, An Answer to the Bee, (which by mistake was postponed to p. 71.) never, I believe, appear'd till now."
92 London: J. Fletcher and Co., 1764; other editions appeared in 1764 and 1772, both for London publishers.
93 For a discussion of Dryden's simultaneous dependence on and independence from classical and Continental traditions, see Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue, esp. 141, 150-92.
94 Papali, Jacob Tonson, 21.
95 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 85.
96 Geduld suggests that "Tonson believed in publicity. He advertised his wares in the popular press and to many of his own publications added lists of the latest choice selections of books available at the Judge's Head" (Prince of Publishers, 27). Geduld argues that Tonson innovated for an unliterary public, triumphing with vol. 3, Examen Poeticum, because it had greater variety, shorter poems, and more bulk, so that "at a single step the Miscellany had become the most representative collection of contemporary, non-dramatic poetry" (98-99). He notes that the songs, epigraphs, roundelays, and prologues outnumber Dryden's translations, and that devotional verse, biblical paraphrase-translations, and dedicatory poems also appear. Lynch argues, in Jacob Tonson that "Tonson did not originate but he did popularize this type of literary entertainment. . . . Besides giving the reading public in convenient form old and new works by well-known writers, the Miscellanies `discovered' the gifts of younger men of letters" (21). For the relationship between Dryden and Tonson and Dryden's intertextuality, see also Harth, Contexts, 187-93, and The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Hammond.
97 Tonson himself reprinted Dryden's works in separate, new editions (not reissues of the Herringman texts he had bought). In fact Tonson made a miscellany of his own miscellany by publishing the first three works by Dryden from Miscellany Poems in another form; see Mac Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, A Satyre against Sedition (London: J. Tonson, 1692). The three poems are sewed together and paginated sequentially. This follows the order of Tonson's Miscellany.
98 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 85.
99 See Havens, "Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century."
100 Clark Library and Mills Memorial Library.
101 Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry.
102 For a general analysis of Dryden's political language, see Zwicker, Dryden's Political Poetry.
103 For example, in 1716 the initial letter A of "All" appears in a factotum or ornamental printed box, and the poem has a substantial headpiece panel, whereas the edition of 1684 has just a row of printer's tools above; the 1716 edition spells "humane" as "human"; 1716 has "dulness" vs. 1684 "dullness" and "Souls" vs. 1684 "souls."
104 For a discussion of the use of capitalization to package poetry for a "down-market" audience, see Foxon and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade.
105 In 1684, Dryden makes this same publishers' joke by printing, "Not Copies drawn, but Issue of thy own" whereas Tonson's other versions have "issue" in this place.
106 In 1681 and all other versions, the emphasis of capitalizations for "What cannot Praise effect in Mighty Minds, / When Flattery Sooths, and when Ambition Blinds" remains, but only the 1681 and 1684 editions have two blank lines separating this from the previous paragraph.
107 Weinbrot points out the similarities in technique and topic between Absalom and Achitophel and Dryden's other attacks on Shaftesbury in The Formal Strain, 75 n. 50.
108 "Upon the Authour Of the Following Poem" largely discusses in the metaphorical language of Absalom and Achitophel, contrasting the bad people and the good poet. "To the Unknown Authour of the following Poem, and that of Absalom and Achitophel" emphasizes the persuasive power of Dryden's lines to "cheat" the audience into sense.
109 Rothstein points out the preoccupation of this era's poetry with power, be it political or ostensibly personal; see Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1.
110 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 115-24.
111 Geduld, Prince of Publishers, 101.
112 Wasserman, "Pre-Restoration Poetry."
113 Havens, "Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century," 505.
114 See Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme, 1603; Thomas Campion, Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie, 1602; also Richard Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie. Contrived into three Bookes, which discusses "Poets and Poesie," "Proportion," and "Ornament."
115 Culler cites Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Isaac Watts, Johnson, Goldsmith, Wapole, Blake, Sir Walter Scott, and Bulwar-Lytton, among others, as using Bysshe's Art of English Poetry; see his introduction to The Art of English Poetry, i. He also notes that Hogarth's "Distressed Poet" is reading it in "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," 864.
116 Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry (London: R. Knaplock et al., 1702). Huntington Library.
117 1702, 1705, 1708, 1710, 1714, 1718, 1724, 1737, and 1762; see Culler, introduction, vi; also "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," 861.
118 Culler, "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," 868-69: Culler notes that Gildon adds more Spenser and Shakespeare, as well as plentiful quotations from Rowe's Callipaedia and Blackmore's Creation. Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry (London: Charles Rivington, 1718). Price 6s. Huntington Library.
119 Tate, Grammar, preface, lines 14-16. Huntington 355706.
120 Gildon published two other poetic anthologies that largely comprise classical translations: A New Miscellany of Original Poems. On Several Occasions in 1701 and Examen Miscellaneum. Consisting of Verse and Prose the following year.
The Melange of so many different subjects, and such a Variety of Thoughts upon them (which, if I am not deceiv'd, give an agreeable Gout to the whole) may not satisfie you so well as a composition perfect in its kind on one intire Subject; but possibly it may divert and amuse you better, for here is no thread of Story, nor any connexion of one Part to another, to keep the Mind intent, and constrain you to any length of Reading; This is a Book that may be taken up and laid down at Pleasure, and would rather choose to lye about in a with-drawing-Room, or a Grove, than be set up in a Closet. (iii)
Notes